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BYZANTINE

bined genuine piety and a strong family feeling, the earliest collection of neo-Greek love songs, known

In an artistic sense the work can certainly not be as the "Rhodian Love-Songs". Besides songs of

compared with either the Greek or the Germanic various sorts and origins, they contain a complete

epics. It lacks their dramatic quality and the romance, told in the form of a play on numbers, a

variety of their characters. It must be compared youth being obliged to compose in honour of the

with the Slavic and Oriental heroic songs, among maiden whom he worships a hundred verses, cor-

which it properly belongs. responding to the numbers one to one hundred, be-

The love-romance of the Greek Middle Ages is fore she returns his love, the result of the fusion of the sophistical Alexandra- Between the days of the French influence in the

Byzantine romance and the medieval French pop- thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and those of

ular romance, on the basis of an Hellenistic view of Italian in the sixteenth and seventeenth, there was

life and nature. This is proved by its three chief a short romantic and popular revival of the ancient

creations, composed in the thirteenth and fourteenth legendary material. It is true that for this revival

centuries: " Kallimachos and Chrysorrhoe", "Bel- there was neither much need nor much appreciation,

thandros and Chrysantza ". "Lybistros and Rho- and as a consequence but few of the ancient heroes

damne". While the first and the last of these are and their heroic deeds are adequately treated. The

yet markedly under the influence of the Byzantine best of these works is a romance based on the story

romance, both in thought and in man- ner of treatment, the second begins to show the aesthetic and ethical influence of the Old-French romance: indeed, its story often recalls the Tristan legend. The style is clearer and more transpar- ent, the action more dramatic, than in the extant versions of the Digenis leg- end. The ethical idea is the roman- tic idea of knights hood — the winning of the loved one by valour and daring, not by blind chance as in the Byzantine literary romances. Along with these independent adap- tations of French material, are direct translations from "Flore et Blanche- fleur'', "Pierre et Maguelonne", and Others, which have passeil into the do- main of universal lit- erature.

To the period of Frankish cot belongs also the metrical Chronicle of Morea (fourteenth

o f Alexander the Great, a revised ver- sion of the Pseudo- Callisthenes of the Ptolemaic period, which is also the source of the west- ern versions of the Alexander romance. The "Achilleis", on the other hand, though written in the popular verse a n d not without taste, is wholly de- void of antique local colour, and is rather a romance of French chivalry than a his- tory of Achilles. Lastly, of two com- positions on the Trojan War, one is wholly crude and barbarous, the other, though better, is a literal translation of tin old French poem of Benott de Ste.- More

To these products of the fourteenth century may be added two of the sixteenth, both de- scribing a descent into the lower world,

evidently popular offshoots of the Timarion and Ma-

zaris already men- tioned. To the

century). It was composed by a Frank brought up in former corresponds the "Apokopos", a satire of

though a foe of the Greeks, and its literary the dead on the living: to the latter, the "Picca-

value is but slight, though its value for the history of tores", a metrical piece decidedly lengthy but rather

civilization is all the greater. Its object was. amid the Unpoetic, while the former has' many poetical pas-

cnnstantly progressing hellenization of the Western sages (e. g. the procession of tin- dead) and be-

conquerors, to remind them of the spirit of their an- trays the influence of Italian literature. In fact

Ci tors. It is Greek, therefore, only in language; in Italian literature impressed its popular character

literary form and spirit it is wholly Frankish. The on the Creek popular poetry of the sixteenth and

author "describes minutely the feudal customs which seventeenth centuries, as French literature had done

had been transplanted to the soil of Greece, ami this in the thirteenth and fourteenth. As a rich popular

perhaps is his chief merit: the deliberations of the poetry sprang up during the last-mentioned period

High ( ourt are given with tin' greatesl accuracy, ami on the islands off the coast of Asia Minor, so now a

he is quite familiar with the practice of feudal law" similar literature developed on the Island of Crete.

(J. Schmitt). As early as the fourteenth century the Its most important creations are the romantic epic

Chronicle was translated into Spanish and in the fif- "Erotokritos" and tin- dramas "Erophile" and

tecnth into French anil Italian. "The Sacrifice of Abraham", with a few minor pic

About the same time and in the same locality, in tures of customs and manners. These works tall

the Mnall islands off the coast of Asia Minor, appeared chronologically outside the limits of Byzantine